Sunday, November 30, 2008

EUR/JPY Evolution Expert Advisor by FxGTC.com

After searching through many different commercial experts I decided to try the Evolution EUR/JPY system made by the Forex Global Trading Company. This expert advisor is, according to the company, their most reliable and consistent expert advisor which has been able to provide solid proof of profitability throughout the last year.

As you know, this is not nearly enough to convince me about the profitability of a given expert advisor. I know ea seller speeches like the back of my hand and I am very hard to tempt with the "forex dream" or any of the usual gibberish used by regular marketers. What really caught my eye regarding the forex global trading company (fxgtc) or their expert advisors was their clean cut, no marketing, straightforward approach.

When you look at their website you are greeted with brief descriptions of the expert advisors which upon entering give you the immediate option to look at forward, live and backtesting statements of their expert advisor systems. No only this, but they are also eager to let you access their live account information through the use of investor passwords. This is all the evidence anyone would like to have to use an expert advisor system.

This was all I needed to test their expert advisor, Evolution EUR/JPY, which has been around for more than a year. The ea provides solid trading with consistent monthly profits in the style of God's Gift. My newsletter subscribers will have access to both forward and live testing of this expert advisor plus my weekly analysis of it from this week on. If you want to learn more about other commercial or free expert advisors please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Expert Advisors : Is your ea Broker Sensitive ?

When one finally decides to buy an expert advisors which seems to be robust, adequately tested, well behaved and likely to give consistent monthly profits one believes that the problem of having a fully automated money making solution is solved.

Well, what broker are you going to use ? This question is important for many reasons different than those you may be thinking of right now. When people consider brokers, they generally consider things as spreads, honesty, slippage, stop hunting, etc. These are all things that affect the trading of the expert advisor but should all be good when using a decent forex broker.

What really starts to matter are details which you should not have paid attention to at the beginning. In essence, the price feed and the time of the close and opening of the candles. This may sound trivial but the same expert advisor may perform completely different between two brokers with different price feeds. Completely different does not mean a few pips, what I mean is that this may make the difference between having a profitable or an unprofitable return on your expert advisors.

So how do you know ? If you have bought an expert advisor which you have adequately evaluated (you can check my ebook for further details on this). You should have had access to live or demo account information. If you have the investor password and know the broker the ea creator uses, you should use the exact same broker to test your expert advisor. Changing brokers can be fatal for an expert advisor's profitability, particularly when they have take profits smaller than 20 pips or rely heavily on the opening or closing prices of candlesticks to evaluate market decisions.

If you would like to know more about expert advisors and how to evaluate their likehood of being profitable please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

The Investor Access, What you SHOULD ask for !

In the world of forex automated trading, many expert advisor creators offer many sorts of testing information to backup the supposed profitability of their trading expert advisors. They show you backtesting, forward testing and (in the best cases) live testing to show you that their expert advisor have been tested and properly conditioned to respond well to the forex market.

We are customers and we are in general honest people who want to get some money by investing hard earned trading capital so we are psychologically prepared to believe in the evidence that they show us because we like to judge people by how we are. So if we are honest, we believe ea creators are honest too. This proves to be the case most of the time but if you are going to put money in the market using an automated trading system, trust, is just not good enough.

The most adequate solution I have found to this solution inside the world of forex automated trading is the use of investor access. That is, ea creators, if they have forward or live testing, are provided with an "investor" or "read-only" password once they create their trading accounts. If the accounts are real and the trading statements are not forged, the ea creator should be able to give you an investor password so that you can access the account and check the truthfulness of the trading history by yourself.

These trading histories cannot be forged, they are what they are. So next time you are thinking about buying and expert advisor demand an investor password that gives you access to their live or demo results, that way, you will now what your actually getting. No investor password ? Ok, then you move on. The only reason why an ea creator would not like to provide investor access should be the fear of being caught. If you would like to learn more about how to evaluate the profitability of expert advisors please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

About Ebay Expert Advisors, Beware !

If you arrived at this webpage you have probably been looking for reviews or information on some expert advisor you saw on ebay or on another auctioning website. I have to say, expert advisors that come from this type of webpages are particularly dangerous. I will now give you some pointers on why :

1. Many times, the seller is not the creator : This is true in many cases. The seller poses as the creator of the expert advisor when in reality he simply downloaded some code (which is probably free) and made some back tests in doubtful conditions to create conditions under which the ea showed profits.

2. Test results are many times forged : People here most of the time forge their live, forward or backtesting information in order to sell the customer their product. They add, delete or modify trading entries, percentages or quantities in order for people to believe that their products are profitable. Remember, you should always request investor access to live accounts when purchasing expert advisors.

3. Audience is prone to hype : Because of the very nature of the ebay market and the people who use it, people who sell expert advisors in ebay tend to sell more the dream than the product. They tend to underestimate the importance of real evidence such as accounts with investor passwords and overestimate the importance of trivial easily forged things like testimonials, etc. Beware, you should see through that.

My advice. Do not buy any automated trading system sold on ebay. Most of them are affiliate sellers of commercial expert who will do anything to close a sale or scammers who sell you experts you can get for free with no support or real results that show you profitability. If you have liked this article and would like to learn more about expert advisors and my reviews about several commercial and free experts please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

The SDS or Simple Daily System, A Free Worth Testing Expert Advisor

Readers of my newsletter have known about this trading system for a little bit more than a month. The SDS or Simple Daily System was created conjunctively at forex-tsd.com . I, in particular, have been using a version of this ea programmed by a person whose online alias is Derek.

The expert advisor is programmed to follow long term trends based in part on the PSAR market indicator. What I like a lot about this expert advisor is the fact that it uses a money management technique referred to as D'Alembert money management. This tecnique simply increases lot sizes linearly with loses in order to ensure faster equity recoveries. It is ideal for expert advisors that rarely suffer from large streaks of consecutive loses but are likely to have several win, loss, win, loss sequences and several profitable trades.

Almost every expert advisor may be extremely improved by additions of proper money management and this is a great example of this. Without this system, the SDS ea would be a practical loser since it's winning trades do not overcome it's loses by great numbers and even sometimes fall behind as per backtesting. However, introduction of this money management greatly increases the odds of this expert making substantial profits.

You should also take into account that people at forex-tsd.com often overtrade their systems. Most of them have tested this expert on several currency pairs at the same time when this is a sure way of losing with this system as you risk about 25% equity draw down for each 5% of consistent monthly profit you want to make.

I have forward tested this expert (EUR/USD daily) for the past month and up until now, it has fulfilled my expectations. The current rangy EUR/USD market is sure to let us know whether this expert will or will not be considered likely profitable. If you want to take a look at the trading statements or learn more about this and other free and commercial expert advisors I have reviewed please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

A Proven Profitable Forex Expert Advisor

Ok, this is what all of you have always been looking for and probably the reason why you entered my website. You are looking for a proven, profitable expert advisor that you can trust and trade in your live account with the most minimal risk of large equity draw downs.

With all due respect : You are delusional.

Let's start with the facts. What do you mean by proven ? Someone has made money with it ? Someone has been making money with it for an x amount of time ? Many have made money ? It has made money on different brokers ? As you can see, the answer to this question is very difficult by itself. I will now make something clear to you which you may have already suspected and which may seem a little bit hard to read : There is no such thing as a proven system in the forex market and there is no such thing as a low risk expert advisor.

Yes, that's right. There is no such thing. This happens by definition, because the forex market is dynamic, ever changing and unpredictable in nature. Hence, it is what you would call a high risk market. It is high risk because (you guessed right) the risk of losing capital is very high ! And this cannot be avoided by using an automated trading system. There is no such thing as a low risk opportunity in a high risk market. If you expect to make money consistently, for years, in the forex market, using automated systems, without high risk, please choose another investment vehicle. Perhaps something less risky, like T bonds, would better fit your risk profile.

Does this mean that evaluating expert advisors is meaningless ? No. By testing expert advisors in live and demo accounts we can get an idea of how they work, under what circumstances they work, what consistent profit and expected draw downs we might get. This is because even though the forex market is unpredictable, it can be statistically studied. We cannot tell what will exactly happen, but we can estimate the probabilities and this is one of the things that tells a profitable trader apart from a failing one.

Let's say for example that certain automated trading system gets a 4% profit from 2005 to 2008 in live testing. We can look at overall market conditions and the past 60 years of market history and tell if they are likely to change, to what and what the probability of working would be if said conditions would change. Was the market in an uptrend ? Downtrend ? going sideways ? What was the volatility ? In essence, the longer an ea works, the more robust it it, that is, the more change in market conditions it can withstand. However, if market conditions were to change to something that did not happen for the last x years the ea was tested on, then it can fail.

This is were that disclaimer we have all read comes into play "past perfomance does NOT guarantee future results". Read it about a hundred times.

What is our defense against this ? Have more than one expert advisor, have a portfolio and have them on separate accounts, if all of them have been tested and are robust, when one fails, the most probable thing is that the other will not and vice versa. You need to diversify in automated trading because the systems have limited visibility, they cannot overcome big changes in market conditions due to their rather inflexible nature. Will every tested ea ever programmed have a period in which it will wipe an account ? The answer is, probably yes.

If you would be interested in learning a little bit more about my opinions, criteria and what expert advisors I have tested and consider worth trading please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or subscribing to my weekly newsletter to receive updates and check the live and demo accounts I am running with several expert advisors. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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